Connecting Textiles: Exploring Textile Interior Surfaces for Power Supply, Communication and User Interaction in the IoT.

We investigate textile-integrated components for power supply, communication and user interaction in and on home interior surfaces. A wallpaper with an integrated functional layer serves as basic infrastructure for power supply. We developed patches as core interaction elements that integrate IoT functionality and can be freely positioned on the wallpaper. In addition to interacting with these patches, users can perform touch gestures directly on the wall-paper. We describe the iterative prototyping approach of these key components of ConText (Connecting Textiles), and present design guidelines. We report on the results of a user study that highlights the potential of ConText, and points on future development needs.